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Today we announced Merch by Amazon, a new self-service program designed to help you increase revenue through the sale of branded t-shirts designed by you and produced, sold and shipped by Amazon. With the print on demand service, you sell only the t-shirts your customers want to buy. You never have to worry about inventory or out-of-pocket costs. For every t-shirt sold, you earn a royalty. The more t-shirts sold, the higher the royalty is.

To get started, simply set-up your Merch by Amazon account, upload the artwork for your t-shirt, and push submit - Amazon takes care of the rest. In a matter of hours, your custom t-shirt is available for sale worldwide on Amazon.com. Once you’ve created your custom t-shirts, you can also promote them in-game on the Android, Fire OS, or iOS versions of your game via Amazon Mobile Ads.

Merch by Amazon allows you to delight your players and convert them into advocates for your game. Here is what developers are saying about Merch by Amazon:

“We can poll our Facebook fans for t-shirt ideas on a Monday and be selling it on Wednesday. This is a ridiculously fast turn-around and lets us give our players exactly what they want.” Bryan Mashinter, Director of Backflip Studios, the creators of DragonVale

"We know how to make games really well, but retail and merchandising is not our core business. Working with Amazon really helped get us out there." Bryan Davis, SVP Big Blue Bubble, creators of My Singing Monsters

With Merch by Amazon, you can give your players a fun new way to interact with your brand and take your fans to the next level.

Getting Started Is Easy: From Art to T-Shirts in One Day

You can start in the morning, and have t-shirts with your artwork available for sale on an Amazon.com product page before the end of the day. To get started, follow the 4 steps outlined below.

Step 1: Create Your T-Shirt

Start by going to the Merch by Amazon Dashboard and uploading your finished artwork. This can be an icon, a logo, or art from your game. If you like, you can use our templates available here to create your finished artwork.

The Merch by Amazon Dashboard

Step 2: Set the List Price

With Merch by Amazon, you earn a royalty on every t-shirt sold. Your royalty is based on the list price you set less Amazon’s cost and a small listing fee. To make it easy to set the list price, we’ve created a calculator to help you determine your royalty per shirt. Just type your list price into the calculator and your royalty per shirt will automatically be calculated.

Merch by Amazon Royalty Calculator

As Amazon’s expenses go down, we pass the savings on to you. This means, as t-shirt sales increase your royalty percentage increases. To learn more about how royalties are calculated click here.

Step 3: Create Your Account

You can create a Merch by Amazon account in minutes. When you submit your design, product details and pricing, you will be asked to create a Merch by Amazon account. You don't need an Amazon Appstore Developer account to participate, but Merch by Amazon does require a seperate account set-up. To create a Merch by Amazon account, input your contact information and banking details to enable your royalty payments to be directly deposited to your bank account (as available by banking regulations). You can use this same account to create new t-shirts in the future.

Step 4: Promote and Sell Your T-Shirt

Amazon can help you sell your t-shirts two ways. After submitting your design and creating an account, Amazon will create a t-shirt product page on Amazon.com for each design you submit. For your customer, it’s like buying any other product sold by Amazon, with existing customer benefits like Prime shipping. This product page makes it possible for you to add links directly to your t-shirts on your own blog, web site, email, social media, or any other online medium so you can drive traffic directly to your t-shirts.

The Amazon.com Product Page for a Merch by Amazon t-shirt

Second, Amazon has extended its existing cross-platform Amazon Mobile Ads API to let you add targeted in-app t-shirt promotions to your apps (iOS, Android and Fire OS) as house ads. If you already have Amazon’s Mobile Ads API, you can add your t-shirt promotion as a ‘house ad’ and you’re done. See this link for details on adding your shirt promotion to the Amazon Mobile Ads API.